‘You ain’t been out lately?’ said Ridcully.
‘No, sir. Er. Should I have been? I’ve been busy working on my Make-It-Bigger device. You know, I showed you-‘[19]
‘Right, right,’ said Ridcully, looking around. ‘Anyone else been working in here?’
‘Well . . . there’s me, and Tez the Terrible and Skazz and Big Mad Drongo, I think . . .’
Ridcully blinked.
‘What are they?’ he said. And then, from the depths of memory, a horrible answer suggested itself. Only a very specific species had names like that.
‘Students?’
‘Er. Yes?’ said Ponder, backing away. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, this is a university . . .’
Ridcully scratched his ear. The man was right, of course. You had to have some of the buggers around, there was no getting away from it. Personally, he avoided them .whenever possible, as did the rest of the faculty, occasionally running the other way or hiding behind doors whenever they saw them. The Lecturer in Recent Runes had been known to lock himself in his wardrobe rather than take a tutorial.
‘You better fetch ’em,’ he said. ‘The fact is, I seem to have lost my faculty.’
‘For what, Archchancellor?’ said Ponder, politely.
‘What?’
‘Sorry?’
They looked at one another in incomprehension, two minds driving opposite ways up a narrow street and waiting for the other man to reverse first.
‘The faculty,’ said Ridcully, giving up. ‘The Dean and whatnot. Gone totally round the corner. Been up all night, playing guitars and whatnot. The Dean’s made himself a coat out of leather.’
‘Well, leather is a very practical and functional material-‘
‘Not the way he’s using it,’ said Ridcully darkly . . .
[. . . the Dean stood back. He’d borrowed a
dressmaker’s dummy from Mrs Whitlow, the
housekeeper.
He’d made some changes to the design that had buzzed around his brain. For one thing, a wizard in his very soul is loath to wear any garment that doesn’t reach down at least to the ankles, so there was quite a lot of leather. Lots of room for all the studs.
He’d started with: DEAN.
That had hardly begun to fill the space. After a while he’d added: BORN TO, and left a space because he wasn’t quite sure what he’d been born to. BORN TO EAT BIG DINNERS wouldn’t be appropriate.
After some more bemused thought he’d gone on to: LIVE FATS DIE YO GNU. It wasn’t quite right, he could see; he’d turned the material over while he was making the holes for the studs and had sort of lost track of which direction he was going.
Of course, it didn’t matter which direction you went, just so long as you went. That’s what music with rocks in it was all about . . .]
. . . ‘And Recent Runes is in his room playing drums, and the rest of them have all got guitars, and what the Bursar’s done to the bottom of his robe is really strange,’ said Ridcully. ‘And the Librarian’s wandering around the place pinchin’ stuff and no-one listens to a word I say.’
He stared at the students. It was a worrying sight, and not just because of the natural look of students. Here were some people who, while this damn music was making everyone tap their feet, had stayed indoors all night – working.
‘What are you lot doing in here?’ he said. ‘You . . . what’s your name?’
The student wizard pinned by Ridcully’s pointing finger squirmed anxiously.
‘Er. Um. Big Mad Drongo,’ he said, twisting the brim of his hat in his hands.
‘Big. Mad. Drongo,’ said Ridcully. ‘That’s your name, is it? That’s what you’ve got sewn on your vest?’
‘Um. No, Archchancellor.’
‘It is…?’
‘Adrian Turnipseed, Archchancellor.’
‘So why’re you called Big Mad Drongo, Mr Turnipseed?’ said Ridcully.
‘Um . . . um . . .’
‘He once drank a whole pint of shandy,’ said Stibbons, who had the decency to look embarrassed.
Ridcully gave him a carefully blank look. Oh, well. They’d have to do.
‘All right, you lot,’ he said, ‘what do you make of this?’
He produced from his robe a Mended Drum beer tankard with a beer mat fastened over the top with a piece of string.
‘What have you got in there, Archchancellor?’ said Ponder Stibbons.
‘A piece of music, lad.’
‘Music? But you can’t trap music like that.’
‘I wish I was a clever bugger like you and knew every damn thing,’ said Ridcully. ‘That big flask over there . . . You – Big Mad Adrian -take the top off it, and be ready to slam it down again when I say. Ready with that lid, Mad Adrian . . . right!’
There was a brief angry chord as Ridcully pulled the beer mat off the mug and upended it quickly into the flask. Mad Drongo Adrian slammed the lid down, in total terror of the Archchancellor.
And then they could hear it . . . a persistent faint beat, rebounding off the inner walls of the glass flask.
The students peered in at it.
There was something in there. A sort of movement in the air . . .
‘I trapped it in the Drum last night.’
‘That’s not possible,’ said Ponder. ‘You can’t trap music.’
‘That isn’t Klatchian mist, lad.’
‘It’s been in that mug since last night?’ said Ponder.
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s not possible!’
Ponder looked absolutely crestfallen. There are some people born with the instinctive feeling that the universe is solvable.
Ridcully patted him on the shoulder.
‘You never thought that being a wizard was going to be easy, did you?’
Ponder stared at the jar, and then his mouth snapped into a thin line of determination.
‘Right! We’re going to sort this out! It must be something to do with the frequency! That’s right! Tez the Terrible, get the crystal ball! Skazz, fetch the roll of steel wire! It must be the frequency!’
The Band With Rocks In slept the night away in a single males’ hostel in an alley off Gleam Street, a fact that would have interested the four enforcers of the Musicians’ Guild sitting outside a piano-shaped hole in Phedre Road.
Susan strode through the rooms of Death, seething gently with anger and just a touch of fear, which only made the anger worse.
How could anyone even think like that? How could anyone be content to just be the personification of a blind force? Well, there were going to be changes . . .
Her father had tried to change things, she knew. But only because he was, well, quite frankly, a bit soppy.
He’d been made a duke by Queen Keli of Sto Lat. Susan knew what the title meant – duke meant ‘war leader’. But her father never fought anyone. He seemed to spend all his time travelling from one wretched city state to another, all over the Sto Plains, just talking to people and trying to get them to talk to other people. He’d never killed anyone, as far as Susan knew, although he may have talked a few politicians to death. That didn’t seem to be much of a job for a war leader. Admittedly there didn’t seem to be all the little wars there used to be, but it was
. . . not a proud kind of life.
She walked through the hall of lifetimers. Even those on the highest shelves rattled gently as she passed.
She’d save lives. The good could be spared, and the bad could die young. It would all balance up, too. She’d show him. As for responsibility, well . . . humans always made changes. That was what being human was all about.
Susan opened another door and stepped into the library.
It was a room even bigger than the hall of lifetimers. Bookcases rose like cliffs; a haze obscured the ceiling.
But of course it’d be childish, she told herself, to think that she could go in waving the scythe like a magic wand and turn the world into a better place overnight. It might take some time. So she should start in a small way and work up.
She held out a hand.
‘I’m not going to do the voice,’ she said. ‘That’s just unnecessary drama and really a bit stupid. I just want the book of Imp y Celyn, thank you very much.’
Around her the busyness of the library went on. Millions of books quietly carried on writing themselves, causing a rustle like that of cockroaches.
She remembered sitting on a knee or, rather, sitting on a cushion on a knee, because the knee itself had been out of the question. Watching a bony finger follow the letters as they formed on the page. She’d learned to read her own life-
‘I’m waiting,’ said Susan meaningfully.
She clenched her fists.
IMP Y CELYN, she said.
The book appeared in front of her. She just managed to catch it before it fluttered to the floor.